


The miles of memory.

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Settle in and find your home [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Maria Hill's food blog, hypercompetent women, ladies in the Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-07 02:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14070531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: Maria continues to settle in and try to sort her mind out.





	The miles of memory.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celeloriel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeloriel/gifts).



> I've been slowly picking away at this throughout this last semester of my MLIS and having got to more or less a stopping place I want to feel accomplished so I'm posting it, before diving back into the three major term projects I've got less than a week to finish. Hopefully it is diverting despite this! 
> 
> This particular piece is dedicated once again to Celeloriel, who is also the origin of Maria a) being a cook and b) having a food blog and to whom I owe _so much_ , w/r/t this series.

It's hard to pin down exactly what turns out to be harder to deal with: Congress, or her family. 

Technically Congress causes her more headaches. By week two at SI, she sits her first session in the hearing, which is actually worse than sitting through a full-committee World Security Council debrief. Maria's impressed. She didn't think that was possible. 

On the other hand, there is exactly zero point in pretending that any part of the relationship going on here is actually cordial, so when she gets frustrated enough to want to ask, "Should I just write my answers on cards so that every time one of you asks the exact same fucking question someone else asked five minutes ago I can just hold the right card up and save my fucking voice?", Maria merely edits out the swear-words and just says it. 

When that gets her a stern reply, she just counters, "Sir I realize some people in this room are still used to being able to say whatever the hell they want without thinking and then later insist to everyone who tries to hold them to account that they must've heard wrong, but I've lived with having everything I say checked against video and audio records for quite some time and I'm very good at remembering what just happened, and I promise that in fact Representative Hyde asked me that exact same question Representative Renfrew just posed, under ten minutes ago. I realize endless repetition is a tactic used in police and enemy interrogations, but those tend to take place in smaller rooms, and in the case of police interrogation, without an actual stated charge the subject is free to leave. Are we changing to that set of protocols?" 

She's pretty sure the jerk leading this whole thing wants to strangle her personally, but she voted for the other guy, so she doesn't give a shit. 

In fact as of her second day at the hearings, Monique's laughing at her and pointed out that she's got about ten years of biting her tongue on a lot of stuff that's probably just hit an epic wall of Don't Give A Shit. And it's probably all venting, right now. 

"Hey," Maria protests. "I _know_ you heard some of the Disagreements Nick and I had." 

"Oh we heard all of them," Monique retorts, drawing out the word _all_ for emphasis. "Did you see you made the Daily Show last night?" she asks, before Maria can do more than roll her eyes. 

Maria shakes her head. "Honestly the one thing I am managing to keep up is I go dark on the goddamn media the minute I walk out of this office. That might be eight o'clock at night," she acknowledges, before Monique can hypocritically point that out, "but I manage it. If anything lights on fire I know someone will call me. I'm reading books. Fiction, even," she says, dryly. 

"Stewart pointed out that honestly you're really comforting in these frightening times," Monique says, solemnly. "You're living proof nobody's managed to secretly turn us into a real police state while nobody was looking, because there's no way any dictator would let you get away with the shit you're saying on public record. He's also speculating that you've ruined at least two major figure's careers." 

"One of the tragedies of the current situation," Maria says dryly, "is that thanks to how shit ended up shaking out, nobody'll ever hear what Barton would be like in a Congressional hearing." 

Monique pauses and looks into the distance, in the act of handing Maria a file with a _lot_ of her own short-hand all over the top page. "Oh wow," she says, to the middle distance, like she's picturing it. "That's a goddamn crime. Stewart would never need material _again_. Oh, now I'm sad about that." 

Maria might've gone on with that sort of vein, by way of venting, except that some part of the thought niggles at her brain. She follows the itch and catches up with the idea behind it and asks, thoughtfully, "Am I right that he _hasn't_ been ragging on Rogers much? Stewart, I mean. Or any of the rest of them, but frankly him and that aggravating harpy from BuzzFeed are currently the best goddamn pundits and investigative journalism in this country, which does not make me happy but also isn't quite damning with faint praise." 

"None of them have," Monique confirms. "Everyone's leaving Rogers alone right now. File on that stuff's already solid, by the way - this company's already got people watching _every_ media-mention of everyone associated, so it's just a matter of earmarking. Since we are going to want to keep track of public opinion. To put it mildly." 

"Jesus," Maria mutters, a quiet comment on _everything_ they're going to have to do, and Monique gives her the _yeah, that_ look of agreement, before they both bury themselves in work again for a few hours. 

With Congress, though, Maria can do that. Is doing that. She honestly doesn't give a single flying fuck how badly she's pissing all of _them_ off. 

 

In contrast, her family isn't actually out to get her, but there's definitely a level where that gets balanced out by how she can't actually scream at them. Because Maria _does_ care. A lot. 

She's just . . . she's just _not up_ to actually helping them figure out how to process how they feel about anything, and Jesus is there a lot for them to have to figure out how they feel about, and it's all about her. And it takes a lot of Maria's self-control, in the uncomfortable conversations, not to break down and say _Jesus Christ, Mom, just fucking have your snit about the fact that I lied to you for ten years about my job, okay? Just say it. That's what the problem is. That's what_ your problem _is: I lied to you, I did it for a decade, I did it about really big shit, and you're upset. Own it._

Except of course her mom can't do that, because it would be insane to expect to be told about that kind of thing when part of the point of the Assistant Directorship of SHIELD was in fact that _even after the Battle of New York_ even knowing who she was stayed classified at least at Top Secret. 

Which isn't actually that secret, despite what people think. Ordinary officers get to know shit that's Top Secret. But John Doe on the street doesn't, and that's the point. And Maria knows her mom knows exactly how stupid it would be to go "but I'm your mother, you absolutely should have broken security protocols for me!", so she can't do that, so she can't be upset that Maria's been lying to her for ten years. 

If you get practiced _enough_ at having to manage this shit, you get to the point where you have to learn and recognize and own the thing where it doesn't matter whether you should feel like that, you probably do, so everyone involved is just going to accept how awkward and uncomfortable that makes shit until the human brains involved have finished having Hurt Feelings, and then move on.

Nobody in Maria's family except her has ever had to get to that point, though. None of them have ever been faced with something where you just have no choice but to own that your feelings are hurt, even if nobody did anything wrong, and you need to wait for them to stop hurting. They've lived normal, happy lives, so now they're not coping well. 

Her sister's worse. While her mother's struggling to pretend her feelings aren't hurt because there's nothing to hurt them - nothing she'll accept - Rebecca's gone for endless expressions of not being able to understand how Maria could live like that, or what that must have been like, or how people can handle that kind of job, all expressed in ways that pretend to be bewildered and reasonable, but aren't. The ways where "I don't know how" means "this is bad", while pretending it's something else. 

And it's just amazing how conversations end up coming around to this stuff, even if Maria tries to keep them on something else. 

She doesn't even know what her dad's thinking. He's always quiet, compared to her mom and her sister and everyone else on her mother's side of the family (who Maria's not currently talking to since she had to give one of her aunts a really sharp run-down on exactly why, as it happens, no Maria _couldn't've_ made sure her mother and father knew where she was and that she was okay, in the days right after insight, for _fuck's sake_ ). He may just be processing on his own. But at least that's less . . . _crap_ for her to deal with than her mother and her sister insisting on trying to process it at her. 

She'd send them all to a therapist, except another thing her mother and sister and all the rest of her family know is that psychologists are for Broken People, and healthy people don't need them. She'd bully them all to going to see Amanda anyway, except that Amanda's in a coma, and Maria doesn't trust any of the other psychologists or psychiatrists she actually knows. 

There's not a lot she can do about it except just . . . wait. 

But it makes it hard to pin down exactly what part's harder. 

 

Melinda shows up at the Tower on a Friday with no forewarning and her shoulder in an immobilizing sling. 

That does nothing to stop Maria from getting up from her desk and crossing to the door to hug her, hard, before she even says anything. It's not something she'd normally do. Melinda May is not usually a hugger. But when she shows up at Maria's office door, that's what happens. 

Melinda hugs her back slightly harder and says, "I'd've called ahead but I'm trying to keep my movements a little obscure." 

Maria releases the hug and steps back a little so she can take in exactly what kind of immobilizing sling Melinda has on and asks, "How bad is it?"

"Actually this?" Melinda gestures to her arm. "Believe it or not this is from some idiot kid speeding while drunk who hit my car about a month ago." 

"You're shitting me," Maria says, staring and Melinda shakes her head, her mouth twisting up in a humourless smile. 

"Sixteen years old, stupid, stupid decision, he was a lot more upset than I was and at least his first aid and his sense of responsibility were pretty good, but he just about burst into tears when the paramedics and the cops actually got there." 

She shakes her head, and takes one of the arm-chairs Maria has by the window, while Maria takes the other. "I couldn't fucking believe it either," she says, as Maria stares, "but that's fucking life for you. Otherwise either I'm so scary nobody's decided to come deal with me, what's left of the enemy is so incompetent they can't find me yet with me using basic stealth, or I'm too old for them to consider me a threat anymore." 

Melinda says the last with a kind of acid-brilliant amusement and Maria snorts. "I think the two second options mean the same thing," she says.

******

**Blog: _Hill Of Beans: Cooking Just Means I Have Way More Implements of Murder than Impulse Control_**

_Post:_

 

** Well. I'm back. **

 

So I'm not dead. 

Okay, foodosphere, before I say anything else, two things. 

Wait wait three things, or like maybe this is thing zero, so this thing is: this is the one and only fucking time you don't get to have the recipes until after the fucking personal story. It's okay, you'll survive. I promise. It's been five fucking years I have made sure you can skip my bullshit and go right to the recipe, you can humor me this one fucking time. 

First off: Right now I'm drunk enough that I have actually set up my computer so that it won't let me on the internet until tomorrow morning. 

Yes, I'm a type-A control freak. Anyone who's read two entries on this blog knows that. Moving on. 

No matter how I feel tomorrow, I am still going to post this, as a testament to this mood - in this time, and this place - and an important milestone in my life, including my food-related life. Everyone needs their first drunk feelingsblog, even me. 

But I'm so drunk that I need to go through it and make sure I didn't say anything that's actually going to get me in real life trouble. Because I don't trust myself right now. That said, if it's not going to get me in real life trouble, I'm still gonna post it. See above re testament and shit. 

My main point here is that I'm drunk, okay. This is a drunk post. Proceed with that in mind. This is like a ladies night okay? In fact you should probably go get drunk before you read this. Join me. Everyone has a reason to get fucking drunk right now. Don't worry I'll wait. 

As a final note: In general I try to keep this blog PG-13 but I'm going to be real with you right now: I used to be in the army, and I'm going to swear a lot. You can probably already tell.

[READ MORE]

 

Secondly. Because I honestly have to say this. No really, I feel a personal need to talk about this. It has nothing to do with food but bear with me. 

When I was a teenager, filled with dreams of glory (as were we all), I really liked those heroic fantasy novels. You know, the ones with people running off to save other people from evil gods or magicians or whatever, swinging their swords and achieving victory after great odds and sacrifice, possibly via their own deaths. I ate that fucking up like candy. 

Don't look at me like that, I know you were all into that shit too, you were probably just cooler than me and pretended you weren't. I was too organized to be cool. I had color-coordinated highlighters and a spreadsheet system to keep track of my grades. Being cool was already a lost cause. 

But just because you all pretended, don't think I don't know you were right there with me. I know! I know you all watched _Ladyhawke_ and _Labyrinth_ and _The Princess Bride_ even if you weren't a bookworm like me. Just own it, okay? We're having a girls' night here. Work with me. 

Though boys can come too if you promise not to be jerks. 

Also every single one of you who's too young to know what those movies are I demand you just shut up. Are you even old enough to drink? 

Anyway the point is, after a few people saw me reading, like, _Arrows of the Queen_ and _The Song of the Lioness_ and stuff, they insisted I had to actually sit down and read classics of the genre. And I liked a lot of them, I did. Ursula K LeGuin, she's great with me. She can sit with me on the bus. Roger Zelazsny did way too many drugs and Corwin was an asshole, but _Lord of Light_ was pretty good even if all the female characters did suck. 

Dad read me _The Chronicles of Narnia_ when I was little and I loved the heroism so much that I didn't even get mad when Lewis started getting really lazy with the allegory towards the end. 

(My mother's family is Italian and Catholic, trust me I could spot a Christ metaphor at twenty paces before I was ten, I already knew the lion was Jesus when he first showed up.) 

And after a lot of nagging and maybe some outright taunting, which I have never been good at ignoring, I squared up against _Lord of the Rings_. 

And at the time, like: I didn't hate it? It wasn't terrible. He had better women than Zelasny but that's not hard. Especially once you got into the battlefield stuff in the second two books, it had some great moments. Eowyn was my girl. 

But I didn't really get the fuss. It was a mess, as far as I was concerned. Narrative was all over the place, the big heroic climax moments were in the wrong places, you had to slog through the first part, I didn't get what the fuck was up with Tom Bombadil and as for the ending? The ending pissed me off, internet. 

I just want you to imagine little fifteen year old Beans, sitting on her bed, glaring at the last page of _Return of the King_ and the last line and thinking, "'Well, I'm back'? What the heck is this?" (Fifteen year old Beans would never swear. Ever.) "This is the worst! What kind of ending is this for heroism and sacrifice and all that stuff?" 

You can imagine her going out to complain at her dad about this too, and her incredibly dubious fucking expression when her dad tries to talk to her about incredibly complicated shit like exhaustion and grief and stuff. 

(You can also feel free to judge little fifteen year old Beans too for being a sheltered precious little priss who didn't know what the fuck she was talking about cuz I sure as hell am. Or I mean I guess not judging, cuz she was fifteen and she was sheltered and that's okay: like it says, if people are shielded from all harm, then that's what they're gonna be, and it's worth it. But don't make the mistake that I'm defending that little priss-princess's opinions right now. She had no idea what she was fucking talking about.) 

But Beans, you're saying, the title on this entry - ? And yeah, so hold on a bit. Just chill. I'm fucking getting there. I'm getting there! 

I never read the book again. Just wasn't that into it. I thought about it sometimes when it came up in conversation. I got the references. It faded into my memory the way it fades into a lot of people's memories. I remembered the outline. 

Then I got a bit older and handled some stuff I got to grips with the ideas that heroism can be overrated and you can get pretty tired, and although it still wasn't for me I saw how other people might like the whole travelogue thing. Still wasn't for me, though. 

And then I got into My Real Career™ and I hadn't thought about any of that stuff in years. Too busy. Who has time to read books for fun? I started getting a screen-reader to read my recipes to me so I could stop reading shit! Because motherfucker if I read a single thing more I was going to fucking scream. I did not want to read. Do you know how many documents and _shit_ are part of my normal day? Way too fucking many, that's how many! 

So whatever, I didn't think about them. 

Sure, I saw the movies, and they were fun. Viggo Mortensen is hot as hell. But I didn't really care that much. 

Then, well. Then it's now. And like. I mean, fuck. 

It's been a rough couple months, hasn't it, foodosphere? 

I mean I think we can all agree on that. Right? I'm not making a fucking controversial statement here. And not only a rough couple months, but the kind of rough couple months that make you question everything you ever knew. 

I'm not going to get into it a lot. I think obviously any bright person can gather from my total absence that I have been personally affected by this clusterfuck. As most long-time readers know, My Real Career™ is in fact centred in the DC area. I was at work on what we're apparently calling Insight Day. I was there. 

People I love were killed. Or really badly hurt. 

I don't want to talk about it. 

It's been a rough couple months. 

On top of that, which is pretty hard to find any room on top of, my work and living situation became pretty intensely . . . complicated, let us say, for a couple weeks. Those weeks fucking sucked. I spent those couple weeks mostly playing sudoku and doing crosswords and trying not to actually explode in sheer agonized frustration. It was pretty hard. 

Things are more sorted out now, thankfully, but every time I turn on the TV I get depressed, and I got completely burned out on sudoku (though crosswords are still giving me some mileage). And in the intervening years everything moved to fucking computers so now it's like, if I have to look at a screen for another five seconds I'm going to fucking kick my computer out my window and I live in a skyscraper now, that's a long way down. 

That sort of leaves hard drugs or books, you know? And hard drugs cost too much, whereas my new job has a great lending library. 

I read pretty fast, so I was going through a bunch of books in a day, and I saw "Tolkien" on the list and I thought: why the fuck not, hey? It's not like it's going to be the painful kind of nostalgia, it was never my thing, but I have read it before so it'll be less work. So I picked it up. 

Guys. Readers. I need to tell you something. I need you to understand something. 

Fifteen year old Beans was so fucking wrong. She was so fucking, fucking wrong. 

Johnny Tolkien knew what the fuck was going on. 

No I'm not fucking kidding I have never been more deadly serious in my fucking life. I have read memoirs by people doing the same thing as My Real Career™, or as close as makes no difference, that I have not identified with as hard as this stupid fucking book.

Which is really _fucking_ disconcerting. Because this book is full of fucking elves and shit. But holy shit, you guys. 

I have a friend, long-time friend, we've worked together forever, she's visiting me right now and I had to pull out the Council of Elrond bit and read it to her because _we have fucking been at that meeting, foodosphere._

That exact _motherfucking_ meeting. Like it's fucking creepy. 

"This is a dire, dire emergency with world-shaking implications! Let's all get together in a big room and talk about it all morning and get exhaustive and overlapping accounts from twenty different people about all the details. Meanwhile at least four people at this table will bring up like six other fucking problems and two major players will conclusively demonstrate they have no fucking grasp on the realities of the situation at hand and the eventual plan will scare the fuck out of you but you won't be able to find a better option. And then one of those two major players with no grasp will complain about lunch. And when you're finished they'll try to have the argument you just shut down. _Again_."

 **That motherfucking meeting man.**

When I started out my friend was giving me the weirdest goddamn look and then by the end of it she was swearing along with me. 

That's just one part, man. Plus, fucking _Gandalf_ , you guys, that poor fucking bastard, Jesus Christ, all his choices fucking sucked - like I don't mean he made the wrong ones I mean _every single fucking one he had was terrible_. "Here's two options, one of them might, if you're fucking lucky, maybe get most people out of this alive. Don't know which one though. Good luck!" And the amount people fucking mouthed off at him, I swear to fucking Christ I don't know how he didn't backhand them all into the _wall_. 

And like when I was a kid, I was so mad about how indecisive Our Heroes were at different points. The movie kind of rushes you along so you don't have time to think about it and besides they made Aragorn really young, right. I mean. It got us Viggo. I'm not even close to complaining. But you can understand this guy, young and unprepared! He's overwhelmed. He doesn't know what he's doing, he's been hiding in the woods for . . . however long. He's just some young dipshit. 

But that's not how it goes down in the book. Book-version isn't young, and like the whole story harps on and on and on about how he's not young, so when I was a kid I was so pissed about how wishy-washy he was at the river and how once the wizard was gone he didn't seem to know what to do. I was like Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you just fucking go. 

Now I'm reading it and it's like: Jesus, man, I am there with you. I get it. I _understand_. I want to walk into the story and take him to a bar and we can spend like the next two days communing over how there used to be a plan and now there's no plan and every choice is a bad choice there are _legitimately no good choices here_ and we have to make choices anyway. 

And people are gonna fucking die and suffer and if you make the wrong choice it's all fucking on you. And maybe there is no fucking right choice which means it's all gonna fucking be on you no matter what the fuck you do. And everything is shit. And there used to be someone else who was better at choices except you know this shit sucked just as much for that person but the upshot was _choices weren't your job_ , they were that other person's job but now you don't have that person and it's all on you and you know, you _know_ everyone is comparing you. 

Fuck man you're comparing you. 

And then you have to fucking deal with these other assholes who have no fucking clue, no fucking clue and you have to not lose your shit, right, because if you offend them or piss them off you're fucked so you gotta be all diplomatic and respectful and empathetic and considerate and all you want to do is shout LISTEN YOU LITTLE UNDERINFORMED SHIT I AM TRYING TO KEEP SHIT FROM GOING DOWN RIGHT NOW SO JUST DO AS YOU'RE TOLD. 

But you can't. So you don't. 

And fucking Denethor man, I just can't. I just can't. Oh fuck man, I'm so sorry, your kid died, it's not like this has happened to _any other fucking people_ in this war or anything, gosh golly gee your pain is just so painful you narcissistic power-mongering fuckhead you don't deserve the kid you still have and you sure as shit don't deserve to lead those people give me that fucking rod and go sulk I'll be over here working with the wizard to _do your fucking job_. 

No you have no idea how much I hate Denethor. You have no idea man. 

Also Faramir's my fictional husband. I would do a polyamorous V with Eowyn on that one, no problem, and I am normally so not into sharing.

And there's other stuff that's a bit too personal to be comfortable but one I will say is like: I don't know if you've ever known anyone with severe PTSD? If you do you know what I'm talking about. If not, well. I do know a lot people with severe PTSD. So about halfway through the back half of _The Two Towers_ I was both seriously regretting ever touching this shit again, and completely incapable of stopping. 

It was upsetting. I was pretty upset. But I still fucking couldn't put it down because seriously, once again right there Johnny Tolkien clearly fucking _knows_. He knows. 

Fucker. 

And of course not a single fucking one of those people was around or available to hug or tell that I'm so fucking sorry the world is fucking like this and half of them wouldn't even fucking put up with it if they had been so that was shit too. 

Then I was almost mad at the ending, except wasn't the real ending. I was almost mad at the kind-of ending. The bit with the fucking, like, coronation and the waking up and the songs and everyone happy and crying and shit. 

I was almost mad at the happy ending. Just, like: fuck you. Fuck _you_ , Johnny, I thought you under _stood_. I thought we were on the same page. I thought you got how things really worked. 

I'm not sure if I forgot that wasn't the end, or if I was just caught up, and I'm too drunk to figure it out now (and I might've been a little drunk when I was reading it) but I was mad. 

The real ending got to me though. And totally put me back, showed _me_. Once again, Johnny actually knew exactly how the fuck shit goes. 

Because it's like that. It's fucking just like that. 

You think you're done, you get the big score, you solve the huge problem, you think it's all over but the happy parades and then you turn around and you find all this shit that happened while you were busy that you have to clean up, and some of it's just fucking ruined everything and never will get cleaned up. You can't get it back. 

You can't. It's gone. 

You do everything you can, you do all the work you can, you even fucking win and then it turns out you're still going to lose other stuff. 

And everything's over and you get home and now maybe it really is time to get on with the every-day stuff and all you can do is look around and be like, "Well. I'm back." 

So yeah so: I recently reread _The Lord of the Rings_. 

It was a _fucking experience_. I'm not sure I liked it or if I'll ever touch it again but holy shit man. Almost the entire world is fucking wrong about this book. Fuck, most of the people who like it are wrong about it as far as I can tell. Holy crap man. Mother _fucker_. 

So. This whole spiel is because I want you to understand, dear Readers, exactly what I mean with the title of this post. All of that. Okay? 

Alright then. 

Well. I'm back.

##

**But Beans** , you say. **That's nice and all, but this is a food blog. Have you been doing any cooking?**

Have I been doing any cooking, you ask me. 

Have I _fuck_. 

Kids I'm here to tell you that at least half of the reason I'm this drunk right now is food. The food theme of this entry is, in fact, **Food That Will Get You Drunk**. 

I'm not talking about prissy stuff like "beer braised chicken" or fucking "red wine marsala" or any of that shit. I mean food that has an appreciable ABV content that you should definitely take a taxi after eating. I mean food that will get you _drunk._ You will be _fucked up_. 

For any of my readers who drink: I am pretty goddamn sure that after the last couple months, you will feel me on this. For all my readers who don't drink . . . well dear god I hope you're having great sex, or something else that works just as well for you. And if not fuck I don't know, I'm sorry. Maybe try religion? I hear that works great for some people. 

Anyway. Food that's gonna fuck you up. 

Let's start with the **Bourbon Peanut Butter.**

Because it's really fucking easy. 

For those of you who don't know how to make peanut butter, [head on over here](http://www.inspiredtaste.net/21318/how-to-make-peanut-butter-three-ways/), but basically you roast peanuts and throw them in your food processor. 

Then when you've done that and its _almost_ (not totally, but almost) as smooth or crunchy as you want, add cinnamon and brown sugar to taste, and at least three ounces of bourbon. Process till it's all mixed in and then spread it on something and eat it. Or do what I did and pour a bit of some really intense raspberry liqueur in the bottom of a chocolate cup and then scoop the peanut butter in on top of it and sprinkle it with crushed pecans, because it's fucking amazing. 

Technically you could use any kind of liquor here but most of them will either be too harsh or too sweet or too overpowering with their own flavour. Bourbon's the right choice here. Trust me. 

 

A bit more ambitious? Let's try **Boozer Brownies** : 

_Ingredients_ :  
\- One stick unsalted butter  
\- Somewhere around 3 oz of your favourite chocolate but let's be real here it's brownies it's gonna be fine if that's closer to 4 oz.  
\- One and a half cups granulated sugar  
\- Two eggs  
\- Two cups of flour  
\- Quarter cup of your favourite liqueur you think would work okay in brownies, I used some Godiva chocolate shit someone got me as a birthday present ages ago that I don't really have a use for except cooking. 

If you like peanut butter in your brownies you could even add some of your bourbon peanut butter. Just a bit. 

Preheat oven to 350F. Melt the chocolate and the butter and mix them together. Add the vanilla and the liqueur and the sugar and beat until you could call it fluffy if you weren't thinking about what really counts as fluffy, like egg whites. 

You get me. 

Then beat the eggs in (whole eggs). Then stir the flour in until it's just mixed. 

Pour it into a baking dish somewhere around 10x10 and bake for between 35-45 minutes (until just done) and voilá, make yourself drunk with brownies. 

 

And we all know how to make **Drunk Pizza** , right? You just stir a few ounces of vodka or tequila into your tomato sauce, marinate your other ingredients in vodka or whisky or _something_ for a couple hours before you put it together (except the cheese: don't marinate the cheese) and then throw it all together. 

But Beans, you say, Mom said that cooking things evaporated all the alcohol!

Well fuck, then your mom lied. Or was lied to. You actually have to fucking burn the alcohol off and if you're burning your pizza you're doing something wrong. Anything you make with alcohol still has alcohol in it unless you lit it on fucking fire and even then you've probably still got something a bit boozy going on. 

My favourite pizza dough recipe can be found **over here** and my tomato sauce can be found **over here** (at least the one you won't be committing a fucking crime by adulterating with vodka - you do that to Nona's Perfect Sauce and I will find you and you will be sorry), pepperoni and peppers and mushrooms all marinate really fucking well into the booze. Ham's kinda mediocre but it tries, and pineapple is a champ.

And if someone brings the fucking Horror At Pineapple into my fucking comment section again I swear I will end you for fuck's sake all the shit this country does to pizza and I swear it's not a fucking coincidence that the one that makes people start shit instead of just going "ew" is the one that comes from fucking Hawai'i. 

There's a fucking pattern there people and it is not pretty. Also why the fuck do you care so much whether other people have pineapple on their fucking pizza? Mind your own business! 

Don't like it don't eat it but for all that nobody fucking likes sardines I don't see anyone off on some kind of crusade. Shut up about the fucking pineapple and have a hard fucking look at yourselves. 

My Nona is fucking ashamed of you. She is. She is sitting in Heaven saying regretful things in Italian about people being judgemental and rude. And about my language. 

I told you I was drunk. 

Speaking of marinating, one easy way to get drunk is to just let a whole bunch of fruit soak in your favourite booze for several hours and then make a fruit salad! 

I have absolutely had all of this tonight and now I'm going to go watch _Live Free or Die Hard_ and pine for a universe where all you have to fucking do to beat the badguys is kill a fucking helicopter with a car, because I can fucking do that, okay! That's not a challenge! 

But no it's way fucking more complicated than that and even Johhny fucking Tolkien knew it and wrote it into his fucking high fantasy epic and if that doesn't tell you we're fucking doomed, I don't know what to tell you. 

Be good to each other, okay?

Good night, foodosphere. 

Beans out.

*****

Maria actually takes Saturday completely off, if only because she and Melinda spend most of the morning hungover.

Maria's been drunk with Melinda before, so she's not surprised that as the evening went on they both ended up getting really loud. It wasn't argumentative loudness, no conflict or anything - or the conflict is with people who aren't there. 

It's just agreeing with each other at a very high volume or symbolically shouting at people they don't actually get to shout at in real life. Or the TV. Or something on the internet. 

But it still gets pretty loud, and Maria's grateful that she knows the Tower soundproofing is excellent. 

Melinda faces being hungover with the same quiet, dour, straight-faced stoicism she faces most things, from paperwork to having a major GSW. It's probably the same demeanour she faced learning about HYDRA, possibly while shooting whoever first tried to kill her in the face. It's part of the Legend of Agent May, and there's a tiny pang in Maria's heart that however things turn out, and in fact however much more work Melinda does on behalf of the world, there just isn't going to be an institutional culture to keep that kind of thing going. 

It's kind of a very trivial outcome of HYDRA and SHIELD's fall, but it's one that suddenly makes Maria's soul hurt. On top of everything else, SHIELD has - had - its own history, most of it secret for one reason or another, and sure now the whole world has the _information_ , but it's not going to look at it the same way. Preserve it the same way. Care about traditions, however informal. 

Operation Atreus - a miracle of Cold War spycraft that only seems more of a miracle now, and Maria wonders how many more agents from MI6, the CIA and even SHIELD's triple-buried operation might have survived if they hadn't apparently been completely spiking HYDRA's wheels and plans for the Cold War and keeping it going - well it might go into history textbooks now, maybe. Or into mid-twentieth-century university history and people's dissertations. Or whatever. 

But it's not . . . going to be more than that. The cultural moment is done, passed, and isn't likely to get picked up, and nobody's going to care the way the whole fabric of SHIELD did that in honour of the agent who pulled that off, nobody would ever have the internal code-name designation _Amber_ again. 

In part because everything referred to her by that, and that alone: _Amber_. After Atreus was done that agent was also done, gone, retired, finished, and had _zero interest_ in carrying around the baggage. And when she'd passed in 1994 (lung cancer, missed until too late to do much but notify everyone she wanted to see before she died and give her lots of painkillers) one of Director Carter's last orders had been to make that permanent and complete, wiping any reference to the woman's birth identity out of SHIELD's files - and apparently HYDRA's by association. 

And now even that was . . . gone, like a sandcastle in the tide. Wiped away. Reduced to something you might know, maybe, if you went into the minutiae of Cold War espionage. Especially since you'd have to do _work_ to piece together all the official recorded references to Atreus into understanding just how unbelievable and massive that op had been. 

How many times it undercut the conflict, how many times it came down to Atreus that things were only just as bad as they had really been, and not a lot worse. 

It's the least glamorous kind of spycraft, the least overtly rewarding work, the kind that is so fucking important and also leaves you with nothing except your own knowledge that _it could have been worse_ , and you made sure it wasn't, and that matters. 

Atreus and Amber did that. Managed that. And in SHIELD you knew, you found out, you learned the legend and the hagiography and sure it was a bit of that, a bit exaggerated or simplified, but it was there and people knew. And they knew it ate that agent's soul alive and that when Atreus was officially pronounced _done_ she left and lived maybe ten years or so in a small, comfortable but lonely apartment in San Francisco and tried to find some kind of life and didn't manage to, really, before a lifetime of smoking handed her its bill. 

It had been part of them. Part of SHIELD. It wouldn't be anymore, especially not after the rest of them - the rest of the survivors, like Maria - finished scattering and found new things to remember and new things to be part of. Nobody would carry it in their bones anymore. 

Nobody would have the visceral sense of what it _meant_ when Barton justified bringing Nat in on the basis of _I'm bringing you someone who'll make Amber look like an amateur, shut up and be grateful_. 

And nobody will know that _Agent May_ was the bridging name up there in that legacy of Female Agents Half-Deified By Agency History, the one that ran _Agent Carter, code-name Amber, Agent May, code-name Black Widow._

Which was a fucking shame, really. But there's a lot of _fucking shame_ and Maria ends up thinking about that stupid trilogy again and about the guy who sacrificed _his_ soul to save the world moving home and having people forget about him because they can't wrap their heads around what he did. 

And this is the kind of shit that ambushes you after you get roaring drunk, Maria thinks, and your head hurts and your body's reminding you that however fucking fun you thought it was at the time, alcohol is actually a poison and it, your body, doesn't appreciate your bullshit. 

The point is, for most of the morning Melinda's a dour brick wall. Maria knows she's kind of similar, although she tends to mutter under her breath and snap at people for breathing too loud. It was another cultural-known, she knows, for most of her Assistant Directorship - though there the withdrawal was from stimulants taken for emergency situations, not so much from alcohol. 

Same deal, though: _watch out, she'll bite your head off for breathing too loud._

Melinda, of course, never breathes - or does anything else - too loud. 

But on the lasting upside, besides _being_ a much needed release, also came with the information that at least three, possibly more of the people Maria's been unable to locate and really, personally cares whether or not they're alive are, in fact, alive and more or less safe. And that's good. Plus, of course, knowing the same thing about Melinda herself. 

"What are you going to do?" Maria asks her, when they've edged towards noon and neither of them hating everything quite as much. 

"There's an INTERPOL-facilitated task-force going to work in Hong Kong," she replies. "My participation was specifically requested." The wryly formal wording implies she has no intention of telling Maria much, which she backs up by adding, "And no, I'm not going to give you any more details, but you'll pick up that much within a month." 

"Fuck," Maria sighs - not about that, that part's fine, but because it makes her thoughts swing towards the Pacific Rim, and mainland Asia, and. . . well, fuck. "I didn't even want to think about the places HYDRA's potentially got tentacles in over there." 

She doesn't bother pressing, or asking stupid questions like _you're sure you can trust them, whoever 'they' are?_ If Melinda's decided the task-force is worth working with and their security is worth observing, she's doing it with all the experience and - bluntly - fucking brilliance that she's _got_ and Maria's not about to disrespect that. 

It would also be pointless, but more importantly, Maria's not going to _disrespect_ that. 

She's also not going to necessarily assume that Melinda's a hundred percent right about it, but at this point Maria barely trusts her own assessment of anything, and only because otherwise she'd be paralyzed and might as well throw herself in the ocean. That's different. 

She's pretty damn sure Melinda's not about to take her assessment of SI as probably trustworthy at a hundred percent, either. 

That's the kind of world they're in now. 

"It's amazing how money makes people ignore common fucking sense," Melinda observes, almost placidly, "and small details like _we used to be Nazis and really we just changed our ideology to be more self-serving_. The level of mess will also become obvious pretty quickly, and let me tell you, at least the interests involved in what I'm decamping to are willing to suck it up, admit there's a problem, and start working on it." 

Maria grants that with a slight gesture, then rubs at her temples. "And then there's fucking Russia," she says, and that's just about all she needs to say. 

Because shortly after she finished being relieved that nobody'd found Vladimir Putin's head on a plate somewhere because it meant Nat was that much more likely to be alright, Maria'd started being a little bit wistfully sad that Nat being that much more likely to be alright meant that the world was still going to be stuck with that fucking idiot. 

"You're going to have to listen to Barton going on about the Cold War and Stalin again," Melinda agrees. "And how Putin's an idiot Stalin-wannabe that someone should just shoot except you can't because it would make everything worse, and the operation of irony in historical processes." 

It's true, and Maria's hung over enough still that the sheer internal disgusted sense of _ugh_ combines with all the rest to make it so she doesn't quite catch the impulse to reply, "Assuming he ever talks to me again, sure," or to keep it from being bitter. 

Then she sighs at herself, and holds out her hand for Melinda's cup so that she can get Melinda more tea while she gets herself another latte. 

There's a quiet sympathy in Melinda's voice when she says, "Natasha's not handling it well," and it isn't a question, and she waits patiently while Maria finishes refilling both their mugs and comes back to the kitchen table before she answers. 

Because of course Melinda knows the issue isn't really Barton. 

"You could put it like that," Maria says. She leans her forearms on the table and looks at the foam. Then she sighs again and shrugs. "It's not like anything's on purpose, and it's not like I don't get it. But yeah I could tell shit was . . . not going easy on her by the time we'd got the last bits of the urgent issues cleaned up." She leaves that oblique: even if Melinda hasn't picked up from her own sources exactly what it is (and some of it Maria'd be shocked if she had), she'll know the _kind_ of thing Maria means. 

"And I haven't heard word one from either of them since she walked away," she finishes, after taking a nice grounding drink of the hot latte. "Definite clear signs they're both alive and they're okay," she notes. "But." 

Melinda's exhale isn't quite a sigh, because she doesn't sigh much when she's sober. "If it helps," she offers, voice neutral, "she hasn't contacted me either." 

Maria chews on the inside of her cheek and then admits, "Ego-wise, sure. Worry-wise . . . not so much."

They're quiet for a second, and then Maria takes another swig of coffee. "See," she says. "This is the shit I was talking about last night, about that stupid book." 

"And I fucking hate that you're right," Melinda replies. "I'm still never reading the damn thing." 

After another few beats of silence, Melinda asks something about the planned Assam site that's just short of being too vague to be implausible as interest, instead of a clear offer to change the subject, and Maria jumps on the opportunity. 

As if she's going to turn _down_ the chance to get May's thoughts on her plans. 

 

Monique's still in a guest-suite until next week, when in theory her new place in Harlem will be completely set up. So when Melinda's in a car to the airport, Maria just hits the internal communications. 

"What's on fire?" Monique asks, without bothering to say _hello_ , sounding more resigned than panicked. Maria's mouth twitches slightly. It's a pretty fair response to her ringing up at this point, even if it doesn't quite apply right now. 

"For once nothing," she replies. "And Melinda sends regards, but more importantly, she's confirmed Morse and Wu are currently safely camping out on Morse's dad's land in Montana and maybe considering letting the rest of the universe know they're alive somewhere in the next month." 

"I am seriously fucking impressed," Monique says, and Maria knows what she means even before she goes on with, "and in fact I almost cannot damn well believe they've managed to _hide_ there - did she just not _tell_ her dad she was there?" 

"Dad and brothers told, apparently," Maria says, "not just that they're there but exactly why - but also strongly impressed on with _if this gets out I will probably die and probably so will your families so shut the fuck up_ and it stuck. There's a cabin somewhere on the property so they're calling it an enforced vacation." 

"Wow." Maria thinks she hears Monique getting something from a fridge in the background. "How'd her dad and brothers take it?" 

And Maria knows she means _Morse's_ variation on _oh hey family guess what, I have some news about my job for the last few years . . ._

"Shockingly well, apparently," Maria says, trying to subsume the slight flare of envy in mordant humour as she adds, "right up to one of the brothers saying that made way more sense than her cover-story." 

"Lu-cky," Monique sighs, drawing the word out; her family's mostly in Louisiana, and distance is a plus, but on the minus side they're being even more Emotionally Complicated about the whole thing than Maria's. 

There's a pause for a minute and then Monique sighs heavily. "There's no way they'll sign on, is there?" she says, wistfully, meaning Morse and Wu. Maria laughs ruefully. 

"No hope in hell," and then adds, as it occurs to her, "but frankly if and when Rogers makes shit explode I will probably still be hitting them up." 

Over the comm, she can hear the deep thoughtful breath that with Monique usually comes with a slight purse to her lips. "Yeah they'll probably go for freelance, maybe even call it _security consulting_ or something. Could be worse." 

"That's for goddamn sure," Maria agrees, fervently.

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, the "more murder implements than impulse control" zing originates with Em(thatyourefuse), originally in reference to a character in the new episodes of _Twin Peaks_ but so, so applicable to . . . most people in SHIELD. :D Thank you to her for not minding my stealing it.


End file.
